Respecifying the information sheet: An interactional resource for decision-making in optician shops

This paper considers how information sheets are used as a resource for joint attention and decision-making in a situated service encounter. The optician shop is a perspicuous setting for addressing decision-making as an interactional accomplishment informed by information sheets, because they are routinely used and made relevant by sellers. The paper builds on ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis and a large corpus of more than 700 hours of video recordings from eleven different Danish optician shops. Based on one single analysis from this corpus, the paper shows how the sheet is used cooperatively and oriented to in situ as a shared resource in the process of selling/buying glasses. A key finding is that the information sheet is not just a resource for the seller but a shared resource for established joint attention and decision-making. More generally, the paper contributes to studies of service and sales encounters by highlighting the importance of inscribed objects to decision-making processes in social interaction.